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Linked almost everywhere by now, but still: a marvellous, marvellous game, dead simple to play, thoughtful, and well-paced. A must-play, really.
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"To extend the "director" metaphor, Left 4 Dead's AI Director was a bit like Alfred Hitchcock: a master of suspense. Left 4 Dead 2's AI Director (dubbed AI Director 2.0, conveniently enough) is perhaps from a younger generation of "torture porn" filmmakers. In place of suspense is sheer brutality and instead of tiptoeing along the precipice of failure, you're pushed over. And over. And over." Much as I'm enjoying L4D2, I think this is an appropriate metaphor: it's not just that it's hard, it's that it's *relentless*; the suspense of L4D is missing a bit.
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Simple paintings of arcade games. Pretty!
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"Mattins is a daily reading, every weekday, no more than 5 minutes long. The 5 minute limit is imposed by Audioboo, which makes podcasting from an iPhone startlingly simple. Every morning over my mandatory first coffee I take a book down from the shelves, hit record, and read a short extract."
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"The moment I walk into a bookstore I remember what I love about them. They are an oasis of intellectual calm. Perhaps it’s the potential of all the ideas hidden behind those delicious covers. Or perhaps it’s the social reverence for the library-like quiet — you don’t yell in a bookstore, you’ll piss off the books." I never tire of linking to Michael Lopp.
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"Pit is a wonderful game, probably the best game released in 1904. I imagine that Wheedle came about by Knizia taking a look and saying to himself "that's interesting… but I think I can do better." And so he did." Ooh, this sounds good!
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"But we are spoiled. Spoiled to the core. As a kid, when I skipped to the Odeon to see Watership Down, popping back via my granddad's house, if he asked me what I'd watched, I'd recount it in glorious detail. It was the 70s. He didn't do spoilers. He was a grown man. He'd spent two years in a trench during the Battle of Monte Cassino getting his hair parted by bullets, so whether Hazel the cartoon rabbit got squashed while out hunting cartoon carrots wasn't really his concern." I am largely spoiler-immune; I always argue that *how* something happens is more important than *what*. Apart from, you know, the massive ones that are at the core of things. Anyhow, Grace Dent doesn't care either.
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"Everyone seems to be compiling lists of the best games of the decade, so here, with minimal special pleading or argumentation, is mine." Steven Poole's list is good, though two entries for the MGS series is one too many, IMHO. I'd swap one of them for something Harmonix-flavoured.
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"This is a list of old game releases. These games were priced at nearly $50 a year ago, now probably a lot less. Why buy a new game when there are plenty of fun games out there worth renting or buying for less?" Games released twelve months ago this week, by Andre Torrez. He's right, you know – games don't have to be about nowness all the time.
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"It’s pretty difficult to talk about what you’ve got wrong. When you’ve been working on something like School of Everything very intensely for two years you can’t really blame the mistakes on anybody else. But the truth is that we need to rethink because we haven’t managed to make the idea financially sustainable yet." And so they're doing out loud. It's a big move; I hope it works out OK for them, because they're definitely Good People.
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"In the desert 100 miles northeast of Los Angeles is a suburb abandoned in advance of itself—the unfinished extension of a place called California City. Visible from above now are a series of badly paved streets carved into the dust and gravel, like some peculiarly American response to the Nazca Lines (or even the labyrinth at Chartres cathedral). The uninhabited street plan has become an abstract geoglyph—unintentional land art visible from airplanes—not a thriving community at all."
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"On the contrary, the quick wins of some big ticket consulting sessions sell our discipline short by pretending that design is some magical elixir that can be poured into a situation and zammo everything is fixed up. Like accounting, medicine, and just about every other profession, design is a practice which is persistently useful at regular intervals. If anything, during this transitional period where business and government are slowly coming to terms with the potential yield of having design as an integral part of the conversation it behooves us to collectively seek longer engagements, not shorter." Some excellent stuff from Bryan Boyer.
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"As a real-life pro skater, you might spend three hours out of every day practicing. Three hours trying new tricks, screwing up and the ground abruptly slipping out from under you. Imagine living your life in that fog of frustration, embarrassment, adrenaline and pride. Now let's imagine you got really sick, swallowed, like, nine Paracetamols and passed out in bed. THPS2 is what you'd dream." Quinns goes misty-eyed over THPS2, and he is right to do so. It was wonderful.
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"It’s pretty common to want SQL queries against a particular table to always be sorted the same way, and is one of the reasons why I added the ordered scope to the utility scopes gem… Well now you can specify default ordering, and other scopes, in edge rails directly in your ActiveRecord model." Hurrah!
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"With the recent addition of dynamic scopes, however, you now have a way to both quickly specify query logic and chain further conditions. The naming works in the same manner as dynamic finders and the chaining works in the same fashion as conventional named scopes." Ooh. New in Rails 2.3, and passed me by a little.
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Really rather good series of tutorials on the FCE4 basics.
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"So here's my theory: WoW doesn't resemble a film. It resembles, rather, a medieval cathedral. And a magnificent one: it is the Chartres of the video-game world. Like a cathedral, it is a supreme work of art that is, on a brick-by-brick basis, the creation of hundreds of artisans and craftsmen, many of whom will be long gone by the time it comes to completion; indeed, since WoW is in a state of permanent expansion, it may not ever be "complete". All those programmers are the modern-day equivalent of stonemasons, foundation-diggers and structural engineers."
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"This December, the Eisner-winning artists behind such acclaimed projects as "Sugar Shock," "Umbrella Academy," and "BPRD: 1947" will present "Daytripper," their first original title from DC Comics' Vertigo imprint… The comic, which jumps around moments in the life of Brazilian aspiring novelist and newspaper obituary writer Brás de Oliva Domingos, will follow the main character as he explores and evaluates his own existence and attempts to discover the answer behind the mystery of the meaning of life itself." Oh. This sounds good!
What matters is that you produce things that are true and will stand
30 November 2009
Dave Eggers on “keeping shit real”:
Because, in the end, no one will ever give a shit who has kept shit ‘real’ except the two or three people, sitting in their apartments, bitter and self-devouring, who take it upon themselves to wonder about such things. The keeping real of shit matters to some people, but it does not matter to me. It’s fashion, and I don’t like fashion, because fashion does not matter.
What matters is that you do good work. What matters is that you produce things that are true and will stand. What matters is that the Flaming Lips’s new album is ravishing and I’ve listened to it a thousand times already, sometimes for days on end, and it enriches me and makes me want to save people. What matters is that it will stand forever, long after any narrow-hearted curmudgeons have forgotten their appearance on goddamn 90210. What matters is not the perception, nor the fashion, not who’s up and who’s down, but what someone has done and if they meant it. What matters is that you want to see and make and do, on as grand a scale as you want, regardless of what the tiny voices of tiny people say. Do not be critics, you people, I beg you. I was a critic and I wish I could take it all back because it came from a smelly and ignorant place in me, and spoke with a voice that was all rage and envy. Do not dismiss a book until you have written one, and do not dismiss a movie until you have made one, and do not dismiss a person until you have met them. It is a fuckload of work to be open-minded and generous and understanding and forgiving and accepting, but Christ, that is what matters. What matters is saying yes.
The whole article is great.
Happy memories
30 November 2009
I swam here. Right here, just off the pier. So buoyant, so warm; bobbed around, drifted out to sea with the tide, fought the tide to swim in, drifted in again. Behind me, behind the shore, and likely deep, deep underneath me, under the sea, was Salamis. Forty-five minutes later, the rain gushed down.
But for half an hour, I bobbed around, warm, calm, happy.
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"In 1986, Williams High Speed changed the economics of pinball forever… Pre-1986, the replay score was hard wired into the game unless the operator manually re-programmed the software. High Speed changed all that. It was pre-loaded with an algorithm that adjusted the replay score according to the distribution of scores on the specified machine over a specific time interval." Good article on how the economics of pinball are wired into the machine.
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Lots of free FCE plugins, including some to rescale D90 footage and make it look a lot better.
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"It turns out that Final Cut (both Express and Pro) don’t fully support the version of Motion JPEG that the D90 is using in AVI files, so the footage needs to be converted to Apple Intermediate Codec or Apple ProRes before editing." This makes things much better.
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"As Hecker suggested, though, that crucial consideration of the "why" of game development — along with related questions like "What are you trying to say to people?" or "What influenced this?" or "Are you trying to say anything at all?" — seems to be less important in this medium than it is elsewhere. That's understandable, since "fun" can be pursued for its own benefit, and to great and impressive effect. Surely we've got that covered by this point, though, and there's bandwidth for more." Chris Remo thinks out loud for a bit.
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"On the last day of tutoring, I asked my 15-year-old student if he knew that he had a chance to woo and win Bastila. “Really?” He thought he’d known everything about the game, but the dialogue option never registered as flirtation. His face, usually so focused with youthful liveliness, grew wary. He frowned and blinked. He wasn’t quite sure how he felt about the fact that his beloved game would contain something so foreign. So adult. " Marie Mutsuki Mockett – what a name! – writes about KOTOR, Carth Onassi, and a little bit of magic.
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"The alien tripods are decimating the city with ion cannons. Wild one-eyed dog-pigs with irritatingly high voices are roaming the streets, mutilating the populace with their fire breath, doing their best to keep their pet radioactive zombies in check. Meanwhile, you – the only one who can do anything to stop this genocide – are in stuck in a medical pod, being instructed by some asshole lab assistant on how to move your head up and down." Hardcasual don't like tutorials.
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"Delayed_job (or DJ) encapsulates the common pattern of asynchronously executing longer tasks in the background." Extracted from Shopify, and looks very, very useful; filed away for another day.